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A Buttery Pastry posted:Reading this, the UK ended up leaving the EU because it joining the EU caused Denmark to join as well - resulting in too much competition in the bacon and cheese market. Well, its more-so that the post I quoted was talking about the "red-state population of the rural left-behind" being ignored by the EU, which just in the real world doesn't happen in the same way in Europe. Both on an actual practical level (ie in the mentioned agricultural and infrastructural funding) but even in voting habits - in the red state rural counties of the US you have up to 90% of the population voting solidly Republican. But even amongst British farmers, a supposedly Eurosceptic / comparable "red state" demographic, anything up to a majority of 7% voted Remain depending on their specialty. Its a world of difference.
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Feb 28, 2023 16:17
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I doubt there is any American state that votes 90% Republican. Some counties, maybe. Also, disregarding the fact that most European countries are multi-party nations and not two-party states like the US, the current Republican party is most akin to the far-right. From what I can tell and where I've been (Belgium, the Netherlands, France), European far-right parties aren't that popular in rural areas, their voter base is usually situated in average-sized towns and cities. Even the Dutch farmer protests, which lined up with the far right, aren't protests by rubes from backwater areas - but by industrialists who like to portray themselves as country boys. Even the common wisdom that Republicans draw their support from rural, poorer communities is questionable: Donald Trump's largest win margin in 2016 was among the wealthiest Americans, but their support is obviously less visible than some disheveled crazy person shouting conspiracy theories in the streets.
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Feb 28, 2023 18:17
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Pope Hilarius II posted:I doubt there is any American state that votes 90% Republican. Some counties, maybe. Yes, that is why I said "in the red state rural counties of the US" and not "US states". There are 24 counties in Texas alone that voted over 90% Republican in 2020: https://thetexan.news/texas-partisan-index-rating-counties-from-most-democratic-to-most-republican/
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Feb 28, 2023 19:47
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those 24 counties combined have fewer people than my little suburb though. each peaked in population about a hundred years ago and have been on the decline since
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Feb 28, 2023 19:50
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Doctor Malaver posted:That's not the case in Croatia at least. First, the rural population isn't emerging in any way. Quite the contrary, it's dying out or moving out. Second, practically the only rural improvements are through various EU projects aimed at agriculture, rural development, ecology, etc. The villagers might be backwards in many ways, but they understand that the new fruit drying plant worth 10M€ wasn't paid for by local taxes. when i say "emergent" i mean as a political force, i'm not denying extremely well-known demographic trends. the economic decline of these populations ("backwards" is an interesting way of putting it) drives institutional discontent, which manifests in euroskepticism as expressed through various nationalist parties trying to insist on the nation state as a more authentic and "traditional" body politic in a way which a lot of these people find believable, in many cases because their lives and communities have gotten poorer and more dismal as the european project has increased its prominence relative to the nation state. i am not saying that they are right here; the nationalists are kidding themselves and have no good answer. i'm just saying, there's a fairly large segment of people whose interests are rather poorly represented in the current order of things in the EU, and i don't think that the EU is constitutionally capable of adapting to address their concerns. the nationalists have an answer which sounds plausible, and that's enough to latch on to. Blut posted:To add to the Croatia and Latvia posters thats also demonstrably not the case in Ireland or France off the top of my head, and I'd suspect many more countries. Applying that sort of "red state" thinking to Europe seems to be something a lot of terminally online people do who live in an American media/Twitter bubble and think it applies globally. In the real world the combination of EU agricultural and infrastructural funds means it often does more in rural areas these days than national governments. https://www.telos-eu.com/fr/politique-francaise-et-internationale/geographie-du-mecontentement-et-du-mal-etre-dans-l.html you can see several major cities as visible europhile dots in fig 2 and 3 here, and this will not have gotten "better". the countries which are almost entirely green seem to mostly be countries with no viable euroskeptic parties during the relevant period. if we consider the three "western" countries with major euroskeptic parties identified in the article, austria, france and denmark one can see this pretty well; the ageing, less-educated people outside of the major cities are much more euroskeptic than the younger, more educated people in those cities. i will accept that saying "rural" was moderately imprecise and that i should've said something like "people outside major cities, especially concentrated in medium-sized post-industrial towns and their surrounds", but we both know that you weren't really tripped up by this and are mostly just interested in an opportunity to insult me because you have some kind of ideological axe to grind in the name of ze price stabilitée or whatever. e: basically what i'm addressing is the rise of RN in france, AfD in germany, SD in sweden and DF/NB/DD/SK/whatever the hell the latest psycho racists are called in denmark. these are the EU countries whose politics i follow; if the picture is entirely different elsewhere, that's fine, but i would like people to explain to me who's the base of e.g. PiS in poland and how they're in fact not reacting to a perceived systemic failure of the EU V. Illych L. fucked around with this message at 00:28 on Mar 1, 2023 |
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Mar 1, 2023 00:23
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Antigravitas posted:The EU presented a unified front during Brexit negotiations and despite repeated efforts by the UK negotiators to try to split off countries or industries they failed to make any inroads. It is extremely rare for the entire EU27 to unify like that. To be fair I think a lot of that is just that everyone finds it very easy to hate England.
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Mar 1, 2023 01:58
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V. Illych L. posted:i would like people to explain to me who's the base of e.g. PiS in poland and how they're in fact not reacting to a perceived systemic failure of the EU PiS doesn't have a particularly nuanced platform, for right-wing populism, and it shows in polling on the eve of their 8th year in government, or 7 years of control over public communications in Poland.  source: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2022/10/18/despite-recent-political-clashes-most-people-in-poland-and-hungary-see-the-eu-favorably/
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Mar 1, 2023 02:05
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Ghost Leviathan posted:To be fair I think a lot of that is just that everyone finds it very easy to hate England. There was also no incentive for anyone to give the UK the Brexit they wanted. Not out of spite or malice but just rational self-interest. If Norway or Switzerland asked for the same concessions the answer would be the same and you'd be hard pressed to come up with arguments why they should get it.
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Mar 1, 2023 02:49
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Owling Howl posted:There was also no incentive for anyone to give the UK the Brexit they wanted. Not out of spite or malice but just rational self-interest. If Norway or Switzerland asked for the same concessions the answer would be the same and you'd be hard pressed to come up with arguments why they should get it. The reason to give them an easy Brexit was to not spend time on money on our end on their domestic circus. Easy doesn't mean that they get everything they want - easy just means that we don't need to change much paperwork, besides reprinting some forms to refer to UK with some convoluted partnership phrase.
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Mar 1, 2023 02:58
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cinci zoo sniper posted:PiS doesn't have a particularly nuanced platform, for right-wing populism, and it shows in polling on the eve of their 8th year in government, or 7 years of control over public communications in Poland. so what are you proposing here - that PiS is not, in fact, organised around a basically euroskeptic politic? opinion polling is well and good but it doesn't really count. organised political power counts, and it's found expression in projects practically opposed to the EU. that has been the point i've been trying to make - this kind of backlash has in relatively recent years taken on a political form and started forming viable political movements, where in the past it was the domain of cranks and weirdos on the right and left with some popular sympathy. if you personally don't like the EU, that doesn't matter if you love macron enough to vote for him anyway. if you personally love the EU, it doesn't come to any kind of political expression if you still vote UKIP because you really hate immigrants or whatever. the political manifestation of such views is what matters, and is what has been starting to emerge with a basis in the aforementioned "left-behind" regions. looking at PiS' vote turnout from the 2020 election on wikipedia, it has an obvious correlation with figure 2 from https://www.semanticscholar.org/pap...45383542ba99f5d, which tracks "economic development" in "rural" (i.e. not the major cities) areas of poland. i cannot comment on the methodology of that paper (it's not my field and i haven't the time to read it properly anyway), but if "economic development" means something like what we intuit it to mean this seems to support the hypothesis that structural dissatisfaction with the way things are finds political expression in PiS at the moment, which is a pretty clearly (though not without reservations) euroskeptic party. my interpretation is that the euroskepticism is not incidental to this phenomenon, but very important given the rough simliarities with other countries with which i'm familiar. V. Illych L. fucked around with this message at 09:24 on Mar 1, 2023 |
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Mar 1, 2023 09:22
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V. Illych L. posted:so what are you proposing here - that PiS is not, in fact, organised around a basically euroskeptic politic? Yes. PiS is your default failing Christian democract party radicalizing rightwards to pull in any people they can pull, which got them into the bog-standard policy moats of national conservativism, law-and-order poo poo (nominally at least), and so on. “Radicalizing leftwards” was not an option because the chairman is, khem, a so-called “anti-communist” (it, perhaps, should be noted that the Kaczynski family political project, PiS is the current manifestation of, is 30 years old – this isn't upstart populism). Their links to Euroscepticism is that 1) Jaroslaw Kaczynski has a vendetta agaisnt Donald Tusk, 2) Hungary is happy to support fellow “illiberal democracies” in establishing gay-free zones and whatnot, and 3) founding ECR with Tories and friends. Now, founding ECR is somewhat of a strike, in some sense, but I tend to agree with people saying that the so-called “Eurorealism” is a conservative ideology that has (very) soft Eurosceptic side effects. Analytical side reading (short): https://pl.boell.org/en/2016/02/12/parliamentary-elections-2015-poland-trends-and-tactics V. Illych L. posted:if you personally love the EU, it doesn't come to any kind of political expression if you still vote UKIP because you really hate immigrants or whatever Rude, you could be voting for your local Volt Europa representative. More seriously, while the map is not loading, I think I mostly get what you're trying to say, and I don't think I agree either. 2020 election was the incumbent holding its seat as a base power grab/hold, rather than a nuanced expression of Eurosceptic will or whatever. My point with the opinion poll was to show that no one is seriously trying to work the EU sentiment of even the party loyalists – because that's simply not the national discourse in Poland. Eastern Europe, generalising, comes from a place where everything was a literal ruin in the 90s, and then the EU came to help us rebuild, which is very fundamentally not the narrative vector experienced by, e.g., nationalists in France or leftists in Sweden, of their chronological EU participation.
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Mar 1, 2023 10:48
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I think that euroscepticism walks hand in hand with populistic movements because almost every traditional political party is pro-EU and when you oppose their policies, opposing EU makes for a obvious and easy policy to push alongside others. And even when these populistic parties gain power but can't really affect material change and their policies end up being not any better from traditional parties, EU makes for an excellent target to blame for their failures. 'We tried our best but it is the Brussel's red tape that tied our hands' etc.. And I wouldn't be surprised if this was really more of a class issue. The downtrodden naturally find their political home in populistic movements and because of geographical distribution of material wealth, you might see geographical division regarding EU. But I'd expect that were we to look at people's opinions about EU through class, that correlation would still show up, and even more clearly. Because as said, you'll see the effects EU development funds more clearly if not for any other reason than because EU demands that their 'this has been funded by EU' placards are clearly visible. Big cities just have more happy bourgeoise people in them so euroscepticism doesn't show so clearly in geographical voting patterns as in left-behind areas. Now I'm not saying that this euroscepticism is justified or not within this population cohort, nor make a moral judgement about populistic politics. Just that I think this is the main reason euroscepticism is tied to these parties. British politics were really an outlier here because of their constant eurosceptic messaging was pushed even by segments of their well-to-do bourgeoise parties. The British society was much more uniform in their dislike of EU.
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Mar 1, 2023 11:01
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V. Illych L. posted:you can see several major cities as visible europhile dots in fig 2 and 3 here, and this will not have gotten "better". the countries which are almost entirely green seem to mostly be countries with no viable euroskeptic parties during the relevant period. if we consider the three "western" countries with major euroskeptic parties identified in the article, austria, france and denmark one can see this pretty well; the ageing, less-educated people outside of the major cities are much more euroskeptic than the younger, more educated people in those cities. i will accept that saying "rural" was moderately imprecise and that i should've said something like "people outside major cities, especially concentrated in medium-sized post-industrial towns and their surrounds", but we both know that you weren't really tripped up by this and are mostly just interested in an opportunity to insult me because you have some kind of ideological axe to grind in the name of ze price stabilitée or whatever. I mean you made a statement of specifically "the EU has very little to offer the emergent "red-state" population of the rural left-behind". Which is objectively incorrect, as multiple posters have replied to the thread to tell you. And which does show a lack of knowledge of how much money EU infrastructural and agricultural funds pump into 'rural left-behind' areas compared to what national governments spend these days. I don't think anyone would argue that its not a very telling, Americentrist, statement to make. Trying to shift the debate to where far-right parties are popular is an interesting bit of goalpost moving though.
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Mar 1, 2023 15:20
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cinci zoo sniper posted:Yes. PiS is your default failing Christian democract party radicalizing rightwards to pull in any people they can pull, which got them into the bog-standard policy moats of national conservativism, law-and-order poo poo (nominally at least), and so on. “Radicalizing leftwards” was not an option because the chairman is, khem, a so-called “anti-communist” (it, perhaps, should be noted that the Kaczynski family political project, PiS is the current manifestation of, is 30 years old – this isn't upstart populism). Their links to Euroscepticism is that 1) Jaroslaw Kaczynski has a vendetta agaisnt Donald Tusk, 2) Hungary is happy to support fellow “illiberal democracies” in establishing gay-free zones and whatnot, and 3) founding ECR with Tories and friends. Now, founding ECR is somewhat of a strike, in some sense, but I tend to agree with people saying that the so-called “Eurorealism” is a conservative ideology that has (very) soft Eurosceptic side effects. my issue with this perspective is that it's very idealist - i.e., it assumes that a PR campaign which gives people positive feelings towards the EU as an institution will meaningfully change their political attitude in questions of european integration. my position here is that what that sort of PR campaign will do is alter the direction of resentment; instead of blaming the EU as an institution they'll blame globohomo or germany or soros or whomever, but they're still pissed off because the issues pissing them off are, at base, rooted in some kind of real circumstance (hopelessness, decline, lacking prospects, disruption of social stability, whatever). at the end of the day these people will still tend to be attracted to an agenda which is not easily reconcilable with the EU's base ideological project and its institutions. that means that the parties advancing this kind of agenda will have at least a euroskeptic streak. the kaczynski project being a relatively old one doesn't actually contradict this; what would falsify it would be if the euroskepticism had decreased over time as EU integration proceeds apace and the specific issues originally causing friction became less controversial. to my - admittedly quite limited - knowledge this has not been the case. re: calling PiS euroskeptic it's very easy to find respectable mainstream publications doing this without any reservations. it's possible that these are wrong and i don't mean to dismiss your objections here - i'm just noting that it's clearly not a settled matter that they're not in some sense euroskeptic. i should also note that i'm including special intransigence with regards to european integration as a manifestation of euroskepticism; so e.g. i would call orban is a euroskeptic despite not advocating for hungary leaving the EU or for the dissolution of the Union as such
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Mar 1, 2023 22:56
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V. Illych L. posted:my issue with this perspective is that it's very idealist - i.e., it assumes that a PR campaign which gives people positive feelings towards the EU as an institution will meaningfully change their political attitude in questions of european integration. my position here is that what that sort of PR campaign will do is alter the direction of resentment; instead of blaming the EU as an institution they'll blame globohomo or germany or soros or whomever, but they're still pissed off because the issues pissing them off are, at base, rooted in some kind of real circumstance (hopelessness, decline, lacking prospects, disruption of social stability, whatever). at the end of the day these people will still tend to be attracted to an agenda which is not easily reconcilable with the EU's base ideological project and its institutions. that means that the parties advancing this kind of agenda will have at least a euroskeptic streak. No, I'm not assuming that. I'm postulating that if fighting the EU was what moved PiS, they would've prepared popular support by channelling the more liquid discontent towards the EU. There's no statistical support for that being a case, which leaves us with the most falsifiable explanation of it being a low-priority topic. In general, however, I'm not sure I follow if your argument is supported by something more robust than “no, you're an idealist” or “but my political views inform that it's only rational for everyone else to prioritize and adversarial relationship with the EU”. Which is, mainly, to ask if you could try getting to your point if not quicker, than at least more obviously, as my best working interpretation is that a party cannot be anti-LGBT naturally if the EU is pro-LGBT, which is unlikely your pitch here. Returning to your question, you said, “organized around Eurosceptic politics”. Which I interpret as Euroscepticism being a primary facet of the party's political identity, capable to outmuscle it's other defining political traits. And that I disagree with – without going into spherical examples about some big supergay party offering them to ratify the Istanbul Convention on the EU level in exchange for permanently reducing the Commission authority in Poland, you can just evaluate how Poland's relationship with Hungary (and with the EU, by a staggered proxy) has changed since the last february. The party views feuding with the EU and with playing buddies with its “illiberal” allies disposable, in favour of their other, thereby core, interests. In other words, we have recent evidence that the structure of its political identity does not have Euroscepticism as a load-bearing component, which is what I inferred from your opener, and what I meant to contest. To be fully fair to you, though, I do make an automatic assumption that when people say “x is an Eurosceptic party” they're more likely to be referring to hard rather than to soft Euroscepticism, the difference being that the latter doesn't object strictly to integration. And while it would be dead wrong to call PiS hard Eurosceptics, them being conservatives in “more rightwards than classical liberalism (EU interpretation)” sense does necessitate that it may have a propensity for moments where the EU interests and the national interests are in conflict. Depending on where their domestic policies (underscoring domestic here, since integration “outwards” is not a problem for them) diverge with the store-brand neoliberalism of the Berlaymont. And in an epistemological sense, it thus is not trivial to distinguish between reforms PiS could want and reforms that Macron wants, and it's why Eurorealists, which PiS call themselves, and which I think it's fine to call them as well, are considered conservatives first, and soft Eurosceptics second, out of technical policymaking necessity. Also, I apologize for the paragraph above right away, since it's 1am, and my headache is not strong enough to make me miss the fact that I'm not coming off as clearly as I would've preferred. To address some minor details: V. Illych L. posted:the kaczynski project being a relatively old one doesn't actually contradict this; what would falsify it would be if the euroskepticism had decreased over time as EU integration proceeds apace and the specific issues originally causing friction became less controversial. to my - admittedly quite limited - knowledge this has not been the case. Nominally, Euroscepticism has increased over the years, but I think there's something to be said about the role of populism and core-vs-fad Euroscepticism (also soft vs hard; how Brexit is looking 2 years later; etc). My point about Kaczynski project is not really dependent on that anyhow. What I meant to say is that the party was established and defined back when Euroscepticism was nowhere near as widespread a choice of the primary ideology for a political party, which the graphs broadly support. V. Illych L. posted:re: calling PiS euroskeptic it's very easy to find respectable mainstream publications doing this without any reservations. it's possible that these are wrong and i don't mean to dismiss your objections here - i'm just noting that it's clearly not a settled matter that they're not in some sense euroskeptic. V. Illych L. posted:i should also note that i'm including special intransigence with regards to european integration as a manifestation of euroskepticism; so e.g. i would call orban is a euroskeptic despite not advocating for hungary leaving the EU or for the dissolution of the Union as such
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Mar 2, 2023 00:18
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These posts are getting too long for me to follow so if I dumb it down a little this is how I see things We got a difference of perspectives, a person from norway vs. a person from eastern europe. In norway and scandinavia in general the rural areas are not as utterly destroyed as in eastern europe where it sounds like they have gotten the USA free market treatment, with soley the EU being the only thing keeping them alive and the nationstate basically neglecting them. So that probably colors perspectives of the people in those different regions. People in scandinavia are used to the nationstates as being the ones who protect the rural areas and the EU is seen as a liberaliser that brings in market reforms and competition from the big industrialized farms of continental europe, thus hurting the farmers here which are generally smaller family farms still and have been kept operating like that via national programs and being traditionally protected from foreign competition. And I know in finland like tens of thousands of family farms have closed down since the 1990s because every year it just gets harder to make any money from it and the size of the farms are growing, turning from small family farms to a more european industrialized corporate kind of farm. People here are not really liking that style of development and the EU and europe is what gets the blame. And sure these people are basically hanging on soley thanks to EU subsidies and they know it, but they also know that they're a replacement for the national programs and protections that existed prior to 1995 so they're not that grateful for them, mostly bitter. I see it a lot where I live anyway, there's a generalized negative view of the EU here and it's very prevalent even among youths, even more liberal people sorta say it sarcastically and make jokes about it, heard it in a song even once. I wouldn't say anyone seriously thinks Finland will ever leave the EU and hardly anyone thinks that's viable. They just wish they never joined. So instead the EU is just there, this generalized negative blob that brings bad news and unwanted laws. The EU has invested a poo poo ton of money into developing rural regions here too, but since the national governments here werent utter poo poo towards the rural regions before the EU membership, they don't get to harvest that positive vibe from it. poo poo this got too long too. His Divine Shadow fucked around with this message at 06:24 on Mar 2, 2023 |
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Mar 2, 2023 06:19
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His Divine Shadow posted:These posts are getting too long for me to follow so if I dumb it down a little this is how I see things Not too long for me. I think your analysis of the root causes of differences in “EU vibe” is the correct one. In particular, I want to remark on the bolded part as something being incredibly true in the Baltics specifically. It's popular to invoke “shock doctrine” in the context of Russia, but what's lesser known is that Baltics ended up doing the whole hog on neoliberalism, to various very interesting consequences. If you'd like to learn more, Jeffrey Sommers is probably the most prominent foreign writer versed in this, and https://www.lrt.lt/en/news-in-english/19/1406217/neoliberal-zeal-spelled-two-decades-of-absolute-tragedy-for-baltic-development-interview is a great starting article
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Mar 2, 2023 15:24
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Good data driven article today on the voting habits of pro-Putin MEPs:quote:A European Parliament special committee recently described the Kremlin's methods of interfering with democratic processes in the EU last March, after Russia's invasion of Ukraine. https://euobserver.com/world/156762 The tldr is its a basically combination of the crazies on both the far-left and far-right:   (with credit to cinci zoo sniper in the Ukraine thread!) Blut fucked around with this message at 17:52 on Mar 3, 2023 |
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Mar 3, 2023 17:50
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Latvia number one, as usual. 
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Mar 3, 2023 17:56
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drat, the Portuguese communist party is really willing to die on this hill, they have been sinking in the polls...
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Mar 3, 2023 20:18
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Blut posted:Good data driven article today on the voting habits of pro-Putin MEPs: Lefteris the Greek communist 
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Mar 3, 2023 20:39
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Average Lettuce posted:drat, the Portuguese communist party is really willing to die on this hill, they have been sinking in the polls...
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Mar 3, 2023 21:34
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Blut posted:Good data driven article today on the voting habits of pro-Putin MEPs: The graph mentions "pro-Putin" MPs (with quotation marks), but in your interpretation they're already pro-Putin (no quotation marks). I know that Sinčić, the Croatian MP is not pro-Putin. He's against the current practice of EU hesitantly and inadequately arming Ukraine and wants focus on negotiations. You can argue that it's a wrong stance and that it advances Putin's interests but I'd reserve the term 'pro-Putin' for people who actually march with Putin's pictures, draw Z on their cars etc.
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Mar 4, 2023 02:43
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Blut posted:
It does seem by MEP numbers the far left has less crazies.
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Mar 4, 2023 09:00
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Greece had its deadliest rail accident in history a few days ago - more than 50 deaths in a head-on collision caused by human error (a stationmaster ended up sending two trains on the same track) that shouldn't have been possible. There is a shitstorm rightfully raised over this - rail monitoring equipment purchased two decades years ago but never installed, the (state-owned) rail management company being short-staffed, the railworkers' union raising a fuss over rail safety just weeks ago, the train companies operating on those lines regardless. Politically it is the endgame for a state that has learned to act as a client to capital and where austerity has destroyed its ability to provide services.
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Mar 4, 2023 09:37
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^^^ we've heard exactly the same points after every large accident in Spain. poo poo trundles on. It deserves a name. Hyper-averagization? Not quite....
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Mar 4, 2023 10:25
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Doctor Malaver posted:The graph mentions "pro-Putin" MPs (with quotation marks), but in your interpretation they're already pro-Putin (no quotation marks). I know that Sinčić, the Croatian MP is not pro-Putin. He's against the current practice of EU hesitantly and inadequately arming Ukraine and wants focus on negotiations. You can argue that it's a wrong stance and that it advances Putin's interests but I'd reserve the term 'pro-Putin' for people who actually march with Putin's pictures, draw Z on their cars etc. Being against arming Ukraine to defend themselves to instead "focus on negotiations" is the exact current line pro-Putin politicians and media influencers are using. They're not exactly going to go drawing 'Z's around the Place du Lux. If hes rejected 17 resolutions supporting Ukraine/condemning Russia, the 19th highest of any MEP in Europe, then his pro-Putin voting record speaks for itself. His bedfellows with that voting record are the dregs of European politicians like the AfD. DarkCrawler posted:It does seem by MEP numbers the far left has less crazies. Yeah absolutely, its in smaller numbers, but its still worrying. Its disappointing to see anyone who would call themselves left-wing voting consistently along with the AfD, Le Pen's NR, the Freedom Party of Austria etc - literal cartoonishly evil fascists.
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Mar 4, 2023 15:10
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Russia sadly holds a lot of institutional influence on the European left, leftovers of connections made during Soviet times. The good thing about that is that those people are slowly but surely aging themselves out of political relevance, and I don't know if the anti-Americanism of younger tankies is enough to sustain them in actual politics.
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Mar 4, 2023 15:32
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YF-23 posted:Russia sadly holds a lot of institutional influence on the European left, leftovers of connections made during Soviet times. The good thing about that is that those people are slowly but surely aging themselves out of political relevance, and I don't know if the anti-Americanism of younger tankies is enough to sustain them in actual politics. All statistics that I have seen show that the pro-Putin position has very little support on the left as a whole, even the far left. With pro-Putin positions being overrepresented among politicians specifically. I actually do not know if there is even anybody who has been elected as a leftist after openly expressing support for Putin's current invasion. As opposed to expressing such support only after being elected. Specifically the German "Die Linke" professed a neutral position on Nato/the EU in their election program, pre-invasion, and promised to support Nato in the hypothetical case where they get into a war on the morally superior side. And now they are destroying their chance of re-election by supporting Putin.
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Mar 4, 2023 15:47
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Die Linke is primarily destroying itself, because influential out of touch boomers are going against their younger members. Wagenknecht's big enemy is the "lifestyle left", after all (it's really code for "things young people care about"). It's a generational conflict in Die Linke, the inner-party split over Russia is just the latest fracture. Meanwhile, the Greens are able to mobilise young voters, even those who wish the Greens were more left. The Nazi party is in lockstep in their open support for the war, of course. e: To illustrate: TAZ posted:Katina Schubert, deputy leader of the Left Party, has reacted coolly to the announcement by Sahra Wagenknecht, member of the Bundestag, that she will no longer run for the Left Party. "She has not been doing politics for the Left for a long time," Schubert told the Deutsche Presse-Agentur in Berlin. "She has been working on her own account for a long time. Her business model is to agitate against the party, her whole book is based on that. I'll put it this way: don't stop travellers." e2: Man, even deepl can't deal with idioms sometimes Antigravitas fucked around with this message at 16:36 on Mar 4, 2023 |
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Mar 4, 2023 16:27
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What are the dissenting positions on migration and corona? I know what is meant by Corona in the text but I can't help having a chuckle at the thought of a party splitting over the taste of a certain beer.
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Mar 4, 2023 17:54
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Wagenknecht is a lot more nationalist when it comes to
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Mar 4, 2023 18:24
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Yeah the leftie movements here also all split up into even smaller less consequential (hard to believe) units over their idiot boomer leadership going full antivaxxer or otherwise full cuckoo over covid containment measures. Looks like they got fed the same kind of brain poison in more than one country. Also our communist party secretary was spouting basically the same poo poo as any other extreme right party, leaning hard on anti-immigration and anti-lgbt rhetoric and got eventually ousted.
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Mar 4, 2023 18:45
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YF-23 posted:Greece had its deadliest rail accident in history a few days ago - more than 50 deaths in a head-on collision caused by human error (a stationmaster ended up sending two trains on the same track) that shouldn't have been possible. There is a shitstorm rightfully raised over this - rail monitoring equipment purchased two decades years ago but never installed, the (state-owned) rail management company being short-staffed, the railworkers' union raising a fuss over rail safety just weeks ago, the train companies operating on those lines regardless. Just to clarify the rail operations in Greece were privatized some years ago, and the line in question was operated by the private arm of the Italian state railroad company.
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Mar 4, 2023 23:31
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is it still privatization if you just have another government owned company run it
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Mar 4, 2023 23:34
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Badger of Basra posted:is it still privatization if you just have another government owned company run it That's now the British railways work, the railways are run by the German and French and Dutch national railways and basically Britain's excessively expensive railway subsidise cheaper travel for the Dutch & French. Genius system
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Mar 4, 2023 23:37
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YF-23 posted:Greece had its deadliest rail accident in history a few days ago - more than 50 deaths in a head-on collision caused by human error (a stationmaster ended up sending two trains on the same track) that shouldn't have been possible. There is a shitstorm rightfully raised over this - rail monitoring equipment purchased two decades years ago but never installed, the (state-owned) rail management company being short-staffed, the railworkers' union raising a fuss over rail safety just weeks ago, the train companies operating on those lines regardless. On this note, Greece was reminded/reprimanded a fortnight before the catastrophe that they were failing their obligations regarding infrastructure investments and emergency procedures. Talk about consequence of your actions, huh. https://twitter.com/Elbarbie/status/1631197012002521089
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Mar 4, 2023 23:53
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SixFigureSandwich posted:Just to clarify the rail operations in Greece were privatized some years ago, and the line in question was operated by the private arm of the Italian state railroad company. The trains are private as you said - the railways themselves are under public ownership though.
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Mar 5, 2023 00:04
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SixFigureSandwich posted:Just to clarify the rail operations in Greece were privatized some years ago, and the line in question was operated by the private arm of the Italian state railroad company. The trains companies running on a stretch of rail do not have authority on rail equipment installs. Trenitalia(trains) and RFI(rail infra) are two distinct entities and I expect the same to be for Hellenic Train(trains) and OSE(rail infra).
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Mar 5, 2023 12:06
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Blut posted:Being against arming Ukraine to defend themselves to instead "focus on negotiations" is the exact current line pro-Putin politicians and media influencers are using. They're not exactly going to go drawing 'Z's around the Place du Lux. There was a feminist protest in Zagreb recently, under the slogan "To negotiate doesn't mean to surrender, to arm doesn't mean to win". I don't know Sinčić personally (nor do I vote for him) but I do know some of those women and I guarantee that they're not pro-Putin. In 1991 when the Yugoslav wars were starting, UN passed the arms embargo resolution for Yugoslavia -- when Serbia had almost the entire Yugoslav Peoples Army and Croatia had police. While this benefited Milošević enormously, I wouldn't call the politicians from China, UK, USSR, France and USA "pro-Milosevic". Similarly, I wouldn't call the US congressmen who passed the Neutrality Acts in 1937 as "pro-Hitler". You can hate the politicians who disagree with the West's current approach to war as much as you want, but labeling them all pro-Putin is inaccurate and lazy.
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Mar 6, 2023 09:01
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